Look, Daddy. Teacher says, every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings.
-- Zuzu Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life
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My Grandma Marc talked to naked people.
I know this because I, um, bared witness to it.
I was 10. My sister also saw it. She was eight.
My grandmother, Marcella "Marc" Walker, the cowgirl. The photo of her on the horse (top left) appeared in the May 1938 issue of Everyday Photography magazine. We didn’t have naked people in the south suburbs of Chicago, where we were from. Or if we did, we’d never been exposed to them.
But we were far from where we lived. Grandma Marc and Grandpa Cliff had taken us, along with my Aunt Les and a Chihuahua named Chili, on an 800-mile road trip, from Phoenix, Arizona to Northern California.
Grandma Marc had a way of opening our eyes to new and different things, and she wanted to show us the place where she grew up. She ended up showing us that and so much more.
She’d taken us to a meadow near Lake Tahoe that was so open and green that you could picture Julie Andrews there, belting out The Sound of Music. Against this stunning backdrop a young couple, probably in their early 20s, showed up from seemingly out of the thin air. They seemed oblivious to us, acting as if this was their spot and not ours, and perhaps it was. But we were there first and they were interrupting our family moment. On the roadside my little sister and I gazed at these two strangers as Grandpa stood by our sides. At the edge of a fresh-water pond, the couple did something that was more unexpected than their initial appearance. They started taking off their clothes, which would have not been that unusual had they not continued doing so until every last piece of clothing was on the ground. They were naked. Buck naked.
After driving 800 miles, it was, for my grandfather, probably welcome entertainment, a sight for sore eyes. He was chuckling as he used his hands to shield our eyes, even though we’d already seen all there was to see. My sister and I giggled as Grandpa gave the play-by-play of the skinny-dippers, or as he called them, “the nudeys.”
The nudeys didn’t have towels so after their dip in the water, they dried off in the warm sun. So they were still naked to the world when we all witnessed something even more unexpected than the sight of the nudeys.
Cliff and Marc Watson in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1941, and later in 1987, with their grandson, Wyatt Albin, on Cliff's 75th birthday. "What the heck's your Grandma doing?” Grandpa guffawed. “Look at that. Look at that crazy Grandma of yours."
As if we could take our eyes off the show that was playing before us. That crazy Grandma of ours was talking to the nudeys.
I'm sure that somewhere there's a Grandmas' Handbook that gives the rules of grand-mothering, and in it there must be a rule that says grandmas aren't supposed to talk to nudeys. Apparently, someone forgot to give that handbook to my Grandma Marc.
My grandfather couldn’t stop chuckling, and his laughter was contagious, because my sister and I giggled so hard our sides hurt. But the funny thing was, my grandmother didn’t see the humor in it. To her, talking to naked people was no different than talking to clothed people. She saw that underneath it all, we are all naked. She just liked to talk – to anyone, anywhere. When it came to talking, she had no inhibitions.
She was the most interesting person I've ever known. So you didn't mind having her talking to you, as I'm sure the nudeys came to discover. She did so many things in her life that she had an endless supply of topics and stories to draw from.
Every summer as soon as school let out, my mother shipped my sister and me off on a plane to stay with Grandma Marc. You don't see little kids on planes without their parents very often these days but at the time I didn't think of it as anything out of the ordinary; it was just what we did. The only difference between that and waiting for the bus to take us to school was that we looked forward to the place where we were going. Being sent away to spend summers in Phoenix, Arizona, where the daytime heat routinely reaches three digits might sound like punishment, but we didn't see it that way. Going to Grandma's house was fun. I haven't seen any of the Night at the Museum movies that kids line up to see these days. I don't need to see them because I lived them as kid. Walking into my grandmother’s house was like stepping into a museum. It was as magical a place as I’ve ever been.
Kids from all around the neighborhood found their way into my Grandma's home. She taught many of them all that she had learned in life. She was a skilled leather-crafter and an expert on minerals, and she freely shared all of her knowledge with any youngster who was willing to learn. Others just came to cool off in her backyard pool that was open to all.
Critters of all kinds made their homes in her home. You never knew what you'd find. Some were of the creepy crawly kind: tarantulas, snakes, scorpions. For a while, she had llamas roaming in her front yard. One year Les brought a pet skunk to live there.
What made her home truly unique, though, were her collections. I have no idea how many different collections she actually had. There were bugs in display cases over my summer bed. Horse and Santa Claus figurines lined the shelves of her backyard hobby workshop, where she also kept many of her prize-winning quartz crystals. Walls and cabinets of her home displayed collections of nativity sets, Native American artifacts and jewelry, and cowboy and western art.
A real ringerAnd then there were the bells. More than 3,000 bells of all shapes and sizes were on display in her home and around it. When you're a kid, you just can't resist the urge to ring a bell. I'd forgotten about that until I saw my own son ringing the same bells I rang when I was a kid just like him.
For the past couple of years, my grandmother was losing a battle against Alzheimer’s disease that had taken away from her all of the great memories she had given me. The rest of her body finally surrendered this week, when she died at the age of 90. You couldn’t really be sad about it. She’d lived as full of a life as anyone I’ve known. She was never really crazy. Eccentric? Maybe. She certainly marched to the beat of a different drummer. Or, to be more exact, she marched to the ringing of her own bells.
We are all familiar with the last scene of the movie "It's a Wonderful Life," where George Bailey is standing by the Christmas tree holding his daughter Zuzu in his arms. In that scene, a bell rings on the tree and Zuzu turns to George and says,
"Look, Daddy. Teacher says, every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings."
My Grandma Marc must have helped a lot of angels to get their wings. Now, Grandma, this bell's for you.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009 at 08:58PM 
I serve as president of the Chicago Writers Association, a position that I sort of stumbled into in a Forrest Gump-like way. It's a job that has somewhat ironically taken away a lot of my writing time. But I do it because I believe that there's a real need for a group like the CWA, a group that brings together Chicago's writers and its literary community. ;)
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